What Ever Happened to Reason?

Roger Scruton

The Enlightenment made explicit what had long been implicit
in the intellectual life of Europe: the belief that rational
inquiry leads to objective truth. Even those Enlightenment
thinkers who distrusted reason, like Hume, and those who
tried to circumscribe its powers, like Kant, never relinquished
their confidence in rational argument. Hume opposed the idea
of a rational morality; but he justified the distinction between
right and wrong in terms of a natural science of the emotions,
taking for granted that we could discover the truth about
human nature and build on that firm foundation. Kant may
have dismissed "pure reason" as a tissue of illusions, but he
elevated practical reason in the place of it, arguing for the
absolute validity of the moral law. For the ensuing 200 years,
reason retained its position as the arbiter of truth and the
foundation of objective knowledge.

Reason is now on the retreat, both as an ideal and as a reality.
In place of it has come the "view from outside"which puts
our entire tradition of learning in question. The appeal to
reason, we are told, is merely an appeal to Western culture,
which has made reason into its shibboleth and laid claim to an
objectivity that no culture could possess. Moreover, by
claiming reason as its foundation, Western culture has
concealed its pernicious ethnocentrism; it has dressed up
Western ways of thinking as though they had universal force.
Reason, therefore, is a lie, and by exposing the lie we reveal
the oppression at the heart of Western culture. Behind the
attack on reason lurks another and more virulent hostility: the
hostility to the culture and the curriculum that we have
inherited from the Enlightenment.

If we examine the gurus of the new university establishment,
those whose works are most often cited in the endless stream
of articles devoted to debunking Western culture, we discover
that they are all opponents of objective truth. Nietzsche is a
favorite, since he made the point explicitly: "There are no
truths," he wrote, "only interpretations." Now, either what
Nietzsche said is truein which case it is not true, since there
are no truthsor it is false. Enough said, you might imagine.
But no: the point can be stated less brusquely, and the paradox
concealed. This explains the appeal of those later thinkers
Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rortywho
owe their intellectual eminence not to their arguments (of
which they have precious few) but to their role in giving
authority to the rejection of authority, and to their absolute
commitment to the impossibility of absolute commitments. In
each of them you find the view that truth, objectivity, value,
and meaning are chimerical, and that all we can have, and all
we need to have, is the warm security of our own opinion.

It is vain to argue against these gurus. No argument, however
rational, can counter the massive will to believe that endears
them to their normal readers. After all, a rational argument
assumes precisely what they put in questionnamely, the
possibility of rational argument. At least one of themMichel
Foucaulthas been the subject of a hagiography, Saint
Foucault by David Halperin, on account of the liberating
message contained in his assault on structured thinking. But
each of them owes his reputation to a new species of religious
faith: faith in the relativity of all opinions, including this one.

Truth, Foucault tells us, is not an absolute, which can be
understood and assessed in some trans-historical way, as
though through the eye of God. Truth is the child of
"discourse," and as discourse changes, so does the truth
contained in it. What does the term "discourse" signify? Look
at any academic journal in the humanities, and you will find it
at the center of a thousand factitious debates: "Western
phallocentrism and the discourse of gender," "White
supremacist discourse in the novels of Conrad," "The
discourse of exclusion: a queer perspective," and so on. By
describing arguments as "discourse," you go behind them, to
the state of mind from which they spring. You no longer
confront the truth or reasonableness of another's opinion but
engage directly with the social force that speaks through it.
The question ceases to be "What are you saying?" and
becomes, instead, "Where are you speaking from?" This was
Foucault's triumph, to provide a word that would enable us to
re-attach every thought to its context and make the context
more important than the thought.

Discourse, for Foucault, is the product of an epoch, and exists
by virtue of the prevailing social "power." It is what Marx
called "ideology": a collection of ideas that have no authority
in themselves but that disguise and mystify the social reality.
There is no more to truth than the power that finds it
convenient; and by unmasking power, we disestablish truth. In
any epoch, there are those who refuse the prevailing discourse.
These are denounced, marginalizedeven incarcerated as
mad. Theirs is the voice of "unreason," and, for those in
authority, what they utter is not truth but delirium. However,
Foucault makes clear, there is nothing objective in this
denunciation of madness: it is no more than a device whereby
the established power, the power of the bourgeois order,
sustains itself, by safeguarding its own "truth" against the rival
discourse that rejects it.

Foucault and his followers generalize this argument, to
suggest that the traditional views of man, of the family, of
sexual relations and sexual morality, have no authority beyond
the power that upholds them. In his three-volume History of
Sexuality, Foucault goes one step further. Sexual pleasure, he
argues, is not intrinsically problematic; there is no reason in
the nature of things for controlling or suppressing it. If sex is
"problematized," so as to forbid some pleasures and encourage
others, then this is a curious social fact, which can be
explained but never justified. He describes his own study of
sex, borrowing from Nietzsche, as a "genealogy" of morals
an explanation of beliefs that, because they have no intrinsic
validity or truth, must be explained in terms of their social
context, and so explained away.

Such an outlook was extremely useful to Foucault, whose
rampant homosexuality would suffer no rebuke. His death
from AIDS brought an end to his predations. But it did not
curtail his influence: on the contrary, it crowned his thinking
with a halo of political correctness. Foucault was not merely
an advocate of instant pleasures but a martyr to them. Still,
this nimbus of righteousness should not lead us to accept his
debunking of sexual morality. For Foucault's "genealogy"
makes no distinction between cause and effect. For all
Foucault says to the contrary, it might be objectively true that
human society and personal fulfillment are more easily
guaranteed by heterosexual marriage than by sexual
transgression, and that the cultural and political capital of an
epoch is more easily passed on where people devote
themselves to bringing up their children in the home. Rather
than being the effect of social power, the old morality could be
its cause. As to which it iscause or effectnothing in
Foucault's diagnostic method could possibly tell us. The
assumption throughout is that, by tracing a belief to the power
of those who uphold it, you undermine its claim to objectivity.
But this assumption might be the polar opposite of the truth.

Popular for the same reason as Foucault's power analysis is the
deconstruction associated with Jacques Derrida. Nobody
knowsor at least nobody has explainedwhat
deconstruction is. But its very obscurity constitutes a large
part of its appeal. By offering reams of gobbledygook, the
deconstructionist is able to fortify his all-important
assumption: that meaning is impossible. There is no such thing
as the objective, decidable meaning of a word or argument. In
the official jargon, there is no "transcendental signified."
Every word, once uttered, is hostage to interpretation, and the
decision to interpret the word one way rather than another is in
the last analysis politicalthe only real questions are the old
ones uttered by Lenin: Who? and Whom? Who is doing the
interpreting, and against whom as his victim? If Dead White
Males have monopolized the interpretation of Jane Austen, for
example, is it surprising that the "official" readings of Austen's
novels give no real place to women and their aspirations? Is it
surprising that these novels are construed as vindications,
rather than repudiations, of bourgeois marriage? Confronted
by a text from the traditional canon, we can proceed to
deconstruct it as we will, for the only constraints that bind us
are those that we ourselves have chosen. Deconstructive
criticism is like modern productions of traditional theater: the
text is read against itself, so as to mean anything that the critic
or producer should choose. And invariably the purpose is
political: to debunk the old authorities, in the name of
liberation.

The "pragmatism" of Richard Rorty operates in a similar way,
reaching foregone political conclusions by a repeated sleight
of hand. But since pragmatism is a native American product
with a respectable history, people do not always regard it with
the suspicion that it now (thanks to Rorty) deserves. It is
therefore worth examining its subversive credentials.

Crudely put, pragmatism is the view that "true" means
"useful." The most useful belief is the one that gives me the
best handle on the world: the belief that, when acted upon,
holds out the greatest prospect of success. Obviously that is
not a sufficient characterization of the difference between the
true and the false. Anyone seeking a career in an American
university will find feminist beliefs useful, just as racist beliefs
were useful to the university apparatchik in Nazi Germany.
But this hardly shows those beliefs to be true.

So what do we really mean by "useful"? One suggestion is
this: a belief is useful when it is part of a successful theory.
But a successful theory is one that makes true predictions.
Hence we have gone round in a circle, defining truth by utility
and utility by truth. Indeed, it is hard to find a plausible
pragmatism that does not come down to this: that a true
proposition is one that is useful in the way that true
propositions are useful. Impeccable, but vacuous.

The threat of vacuousness does not deter Rorty, who sees
pragmatism as a weapon against the old idea of reason. Even
though he fails dismally in the attempt to say what pragmatism
really is, this failure is of no interest to his followers, who take
it in their stride, just as they take in their stride the emptiness
of Foucault's "genealogy" of morals and the impenetrable
nonsense of deconstruction. It is enough that Rorty invokes his
pragmatism as a kind of magic spell against the old idea of
reason and in the cause of cultural relativism. It is this that
qualifies him for guru status in our departments of humanities.

In his words: "Pragmatists view truth as . . . what is good for
us to believe. . . . They see the gap between truth and
justification not as something to be bridged by isolating a
natural and trans-cultural sort of rationality which can be used
to criticize certain cultures and praise others, but simply as the
gap between the actual good and the possible better. . . . For
pragmatists, the desire for objectivity is not the desire to
escape the limitations of one's community, but simply the
desire for as much intersubjective agreement as possible, the
desire to extend the reference of `us' as far as we can." In other
words, pragmatism enables us to dismiss the idea of a "trans-
cultural . . . rationality." There is no point to the old ideas of
objectivity and universal truth; all that matters is that we
agree.

But who are we? And what do we agree about? Turn to
Rorty's essays, and you will soon find out. "We" are all
feminists, liberals, advocates of gay liberation and the open
curriculum; "we" do not believe in God or in any inherited
religion; nor do the old ideas of authority, order, and self-
discipline carry weight for us. "We" make up our minds as to
the meaning of texts by creating through our words the
consensus that includes us. There is no constraint on us,
beyond the community to which we have chosen to belong.
And because there is no objective truth but only our own self-
engendered consensus, our position is unassailable from any
point of view outside it. The pragmatist not only can decide
what to think; he can protect himself from whoever doesn't
think the same.

A true pragmatist will no doubt invent history just as he
invents everything else, by persuading "us" to agree with him.
Nevertheless, it is worth taking a glance at history, if only to
see how paradoxical and dangerous is Rorty's view of the
human intellect. The Islamic ummahthe society of all
believerswas and remains the most extended consensus the
world has ever known. It expressly recognizes consensus
(ijma`) as a criterion of, and indeed a substitute for, truth, and
it is engaged in a never-ceasing endeavor to include as many
as possible in its comprehensive first-person plural. Moreover,
whatever Rorty means by "good" or "better" beliefs, the pious
Muslim must surely count as having some of the very best:
beliefs that bring security, stability, happiness, a handle on the
world, and a cheerful conscience as one blows up the kafirs
who think otherwise.

Yet still, is there not a nagging feeling somewhere that those
heartwarming beliefs might not be true, and that the enervated
opinions of the postmodern atheist might just have the edge on
them? On Rorty's account of pragmatism, this is not
something a pragmatist can say. After all, postmodern atheists,
unlike pious Muslims, don't compose a communitynot even
an imagined community. They have no credo or catechism, no
sacred text, no established consensus. Yet Rorty is a
postmodern atheist. Why? Not because he belongs to a
community of unbelievers, but because he thinks that atheism
is true. The pragmatism that puts consensus in the place of
truth turns out to be a sham.

In its own eyes, the Enlightenment involved the celebration of
universal values and a common human nature. The art of the
Enlightenment ranged over other places, other times, and other
cultures, in a heroic attempt to vindicate a vision of man as
free and self- created. That vision inspired and was inspired by
the old curriculum, and it has been the first concern of the
postmodern university to put it in question. This concern
explains the popularity of another relativist guruEdward
Said, whose book Orientalism showed how to dismiss the
Enlightenment itself as a form of cultural imperialism. The
Orient appears in Western art and literature, Said argues, as
something exotic, unreal, theatrical, and therefore unserious.
Far from being a generous acknowledgment of other cultures,
the orientalist art of Enlightenment Europe is an attempt to
belittle them, to reduce them to decorative episodes within the
great imperium of Western progress.

Said's argument goes hand in hand with the advocacy of a
multicultural curriculum. The old curriculum, a product of the
Enlightenment, is, we are told, monocultural, devoted to
perpetuating the view of Western civilization as inherently
superior to its rivals. It is also patriarchal, the product of Dead
White European Males, who have since lost all authority. And
its assumption of a universal rational perspective, from the
vantage point of which all humanity can be studied, is nothing
better than a rationalization of its imperialist ambitions. By
contrast, we who live in the amorphous and multicultural
environment of the postmodern city must open our hearts and
minds to all cultures and be wedded to none. The inescapable
result of this is relativism: the recognition that no culture has
any special claim to our attention, and that no culture can be
judged or dismissed from outside.

But once again there is a paradox. For those who advocate this
multicultural approach are as a rule vehement in their
dismissal of Western culture. Said is no exception. While
exhorting us to judge other cultures on their own terms, he is
also asking us to judge Western culture from a point of view
outsideto set it against alternatives and to judge it adversely
as ethnocentric and racist.

But the criticisms offered of Western culture are really
confirmations of its claim to favor. It is thanks to the
Enlightenment and its universal view of human values that
racial and sexual equality have such a commonsense appeal to
us. It is the universalist vision of man that makes us demand
so much of Western art and literaturemore than we should
ever demand of the art and literature of Java, Borneo, or
China. It is the very attempt to embrace other culturesan
attempt that has no parallel in the traditional art of Arabia,
India, or Africathat makes Western art a hostage to Said's
caviling strictures. And it is only a very narrow view of our
artistic tradition that does not discover in it a multicultural
approach that is far more imaginative than anything now
taught under that name. Our culture invokes an historical
community of sentiment, while celebrating universal human
values. It is rooted in the Christian experience but draws from
that source a wealth of human feeling that it spreads
impartially over imagined worlds. From Ariosto's Orlando
Furioso to Byron's Don Juan, from Monteverdi's Poppea to
Longfellow's Hiawatha, from The Winter's Tale to Madama
Butterfly, our culture has continuously ventured into spiritual
territory that has no place on the Christian map.

The Enlightenment, which set before us an ideal of objective
truth, also cleared away the mist of religious doctrine. The
moral conscience, cut off from religious observance, began to
see itself from outside. At the same time, the belief in a
universal human nature, so powerfully defended by
Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume, kept skepticism at bay.
Their Enlightenment contemporaries would have regarded as
absurd the suggestion that, in tracing the course of human
sympathy, Shaftesbury and Hume were merely describing an
aspect of "Western" culture. To them, the "moral sciences,"
including the study of art and literature, embodied what T. S.
Eliot later called a "common pursuit of true judgment." And
this common pursuit occupied the great thinkers of the
Victorian age, who, even when they made the first ventures
into sociology and anthropology, believed in the objective
validity of their results and in a universal human nature that
would be revealed in them.

All that has changed utterly. In place of objectivity we have
only "inter-subjectivity"in other words, consensus. Truths,
meanings, facts, and values are now regarded as negotiable.
The curious thing, however, is that this woolly-minded
subjectivism goes hand in hand with a vigorous censorship.
Those who put consensus in the place of truth find themselves
distinguishing the true from the false consensus. Thus the
consensus Rorty assumes rigorously excludes all
conservatives, traditionalists, and reactionaries. Only liberals
can belong to it; just as only feminists, radicals, gay activists,
and anti- authoritarians can take advantage of deconstruction;
just as only the opponents of "power" can make use of
Foucault's techniques of moral sabotage; and just as
onlymulticulturalists can avail themselves of Said's critique of
Enlightenment values. The inescapable conclusion is that
today's gurus advocate subjectivity, relativity, and
irrationalism not in order to let in all opinions but precisely to
exclude the opinions of people who believe in old authorities
and objective truths.

If you study the opinions that prevail in modern academies,
you will discover that they are of two kinds: those that emerge
from the constant questioning of traditional values, and those
that emerge from the attempt to prevent any questioning of the
liberal alternatives. All of the following beliefs are effectively
forbidden on the normal American campus: (1) The belief in
the superiority of Western culture; (2) The belief that there
might be morally relevant distinctions between sexes, cultures,
and religions; (3) The belief in good taste, whether in
literature, music, art, friendship, or behavior; and (4) The
belief in traditional sexual mores. You can entertain those
beliefs, but it is dangerous to confess to them, still more
dangerous to defend them, lest you be held guilty of "hate
speech"in other words, of judging some group of human
beings adversely. Yet the hostility to these beliefs is not
founded on reason and is never subjected to rational
justification. The postmodern university has not defeated
reason but replaced it with a new kind of faitha faith
without authority and without transcendence, a faith all the
more tenacious in that it does not recognize itself as such.

The religion of political correctness is not confined to
America. Recently Glen Hoddle, the English soccer coach,
expressed the view (perfectly acceptable when uttered by a
representative of some ethnic minority) that disabled people
are suffering in this life for sins committed in another. He was
at once castigated by his employers, by the media, and by the
government, in a remarkable series of show trials. He was then
fired. Such witch trials are more and more frequent in Britain,
conducted outside the courts by bureaucrats and quasi-
independent commissions like the Commission for Racial
Equality. And the guiding principle is always "Guilty until
proved innocent."

Similarly, you will find that almost all those who espouse the
relativistic "methods" that Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty have
introduced into the humanities are vehement adherents of a
code of political correctness that condemns deviation in
absolute and intransigent terms. The relativistic theory exists
in order to support an absolutist doctrine. Hence the extreme
disarray that entered the camp of deconstruction when it was
discovered that one of the leading ecclesiastics, Paul de Man,
once had Nazi sympathies. It is manifestly absurd to suggest
that a similar disarray would have attended the discovery that
Paul de Man had once been a communisteven if he had
taken part in some of the great communist crimes. In such a
case he would have enjoyed the same compassionate
endorsement as was afforded to communists and fellow
travelers Lukacs, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre. The assault on
meaning undertaken by the deconstructionists is not an assault
on "our" meanings, which remain exactly what they always
were: radical, egalitarian, and transgressive. It is an assault on
"their" meaningsthe meanings sequestered in a tradition of
artistic and philosophical thinking and passed on from
generation to generation by the old forms of scholarship.

All that is worth bearing in mind when we consider the current
state of intellectual life in Europe and America. Although
areas like philosophy have been for many years immune to the
prevailing subjectivism, they too are beginning to succumb to
it. Teachers who remain wedded to what Rorty calls "a natural
and trans-cultural sort of rationality"in other words, who
believe they can say something permanently and universally
true about the human conditionfind it increasingly difficult
to appeal to students for whom negotiation has taken the place
of rational argument. To expound Aristotle's ethics and to
point out that the cardinal virtues Aristotle defended are as
much a part of happiness for modern people as they were for
ancient Greeks is to invite incomprehension. The best the
modern student can manage is curiosity: That, he will
acknowledge, is how they saw the matter. As to how I see it,
who knows?

From this state of bewildered skepticism, the student may take
a leap of faith. And the leap is never backward into the old
curriculum, the old canon, the old belief in objective standards
and settled ways of life. It is always a leap forward, into the
world of free choice and free opinion, in which nothing has
authority and nothing is objectively right or wrong. In this
postmodern world there is no such thing as adverse
judgmentunless it be of the adverse judge. It is a playground
world, in which all are equally entitled to their culture, their
"lifestyle," and their opinions.

And that is why, paradoxically, the postmodern curriculum is
so censoriousin just the way that liberalism is censorious.
When everything is permitted, it is vital to forbid the
forbidder. All serious cultures are founded on the distinctions
between right and wrong, true and false, good taste and bad,
knowledge and ignorance. It was to the perpetuation of those
distinctions that the humanities, in the past, were devoted.
Hence the postmodern assault on the curriculum and the
vehement attempt to impose a standard of "political
correctness"which means, in effect, a standard of non-
exclusion and non-judgment.

But the attack on the old curriculum is unfounded, for the old
curriculum was far from monocultural. Our ancestors
studiedand I mean really studiedcultures that were
entirely strange to them. They learned the languages and
literature of Greece and Rome; came to understand, love, and
even in their own way to worship the pagan gods; translated
from Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Arabic; and roamed the world
with an insatiable curiosity, believing on the best of grounds
that nothing human would be alien to them. It was second
nature to the nineteenth-century graduate to learn the language
of a country to which he traveled, to study its literature,
religion, history, and customsoften to the extent of going
native, like many of the British in India and many of the
Indians in Britain. The European Enlightenment, transferred
by trade and colonial adventure to the shores of the Eastern
Mediterranean, inspired the intellectual class of Egypt and
Lebanon with the vision of universal learning. Edward Said is
a product of this: a living disproof of his own favorite theories.

All that returns us to the deeply paradoxical nature of the new
relativism. While holding that all cultures are equal and
judgment among them absurd, the new relativism covertly
appeals to the opposite belief. It is in the business of
convincing us that Western culture, and the traditional
curriculum, are racist, ethnocentric, patriarchal, and therefore
beyond the pale of political acceptability. False though these
accusations are, they presuppose the very universalist vision
that they declare to be impossible.

The subliminal awareness of this paradox explains the
popularity of the gurus I have discussed. Their arguments
belong to a new species of theology: the theology of political
correctness. As in all theology, it is not the quality of the
argument, but the nature of the conclusion, that renders the
discussion acceptable. The relativist beliefs exist because they
sustain a communitythe new ummah of the rootless and the
disaffected. Hence, in Rorty, Derrida, and Foucault, we find a
shared duplicity of purpose: on the one hand to undermine all
claims to absolute truth and on the other hand to uphold the
orthodoxies upon which their congregation depends. The very
reasoning that sets out to destroy the ideas of objective truth
and absolute value imposes political correctness as absolutely
binding and cultural relativism as objectively true.

What should be our response to this? Surely the first
conclusion we should draw is that the new relativism is self-
contradictory. Its absolute censoriousness is already proof of
this; so too is its constant assumption of the "trans-cultural"
perspective that it denies to be possible. Without such a
perspective, the very idea of a plurality of cultures could not
be expressed. And what is this perspectivethe "point of view
beyond culture"if not the perspective of reason?

The second conclusion to draw is that, intellectually speaking,
the Enlightenment project, as Alasdair MacIntyre has called
itthe project of deriving an objective morality from rational
argumentis as much a reality for us as it was for Kant or
Hegel. The problem lies not in giving rational grounds for
morality or objective principles of criticism. The problem lies
in persuading people to accept them. Although there are those,
like John Gray, who tell us that the project has failed, the
failure lies in them and not in the project. It is possible to give
a reasoned defense of traditional morality and to show just
why human nature and personal relations require it. But the
argument is difficult. Not everyone can follow it; nor does
everyone have the time, the inclination, or the requisite sense
of what is at stake. Hence reason, which stirs up easy
questions while providing only difficult replies, will be more
likely to destroy our pieties than to give new grounds for
them.

What is wrong with the Enlightenment project is not the belief
that reason can provide a trans-cultural morality. For that
belief is true. What is wrong is the assumption that people
have some faint interest in reason. The falsehood of this
assumption is there for all to see in our academies: in the
relativism of their gurus and in the misguided absolutism
absolutism about the wrong things and for the wrong reasons,
absolutism that excludes all but the relativists from their
doors.